Artist's Workshop - Entrails, Doorways, and Quest Fronts Title Frame

When I resume the Patreon in February, I set a goal of $150 to hire an artist to illustrate all my work. But you know, I'm just not good at the business of holding efforts until I see the money. I'm way too driven by passion with all these projects, and I couldn't help but look for the artist already.

THE WORKING STYLE

It all started when I started toying with the idea of making a cover for the quest fronts and make some sort of compendium that would be presented in the form of a magazine.

So Shawn was right: these kinds of images are a very powerful source of motivation. I called Rubén and told him to start working already. I sent him all the quest fronts I've made so far and he fell in love with the content.

First and foremost, he encouraged me to revamp the whole layout of the quest fronts and fill it with as much art as we can, because of course, that what an artist that sees my texts would do, and I agreed.

To start working together we've set some ethos:

• Infuse ourselves with the tone of the Ironlands to come up with the concepts.
• Inhale the style of Forbidden Lands to make it our main point of reference for visual appeal, because that same style is what I crave to be present in the quest fronts magazine.
• Do not illustrate anything that will prescribe the player's experience during the game sessions and keep it vague enough for the player to fill the holes. This implies not illustrating events, but rather scenarios or elements of the diegesis.
• Be critical and picky to filter what will be presented. Rubén makes several sketches until he feels comfortable enough to send me a bunch, so I can choose which one he will work on.

Rubén is very old-school. He doesn't work with tablets or computers to make his illustrations. He uses pens, pencils, markers, chalk, ink, dye, rulers, compasses, thin cardboard, papers of different sizes (letter, legal, and government legal), techniques, and analog hand-drawing skills.

When he finishes a work, he sends them to me, which I turn into SVG and add them to the layout of the magazine using Adobe InDesign. The purpose of the images to be SVG and not PNG is to avoid pixelation when zooming in the document, which unfortunately happens in some masterwork such as, ironically, Forbidden Lands.

QUEST FRONTS REWORK

The schedule of this Patreon is to provide a free, public quest front the first week of each month. However, the first quest front of this month has been delayed. The reason is that the format is currently being revised.

I'm working side-by-side with the artist to make the Quest Fronts magazine come to fruition. For it, we reduced the size of it from Letter to A5. Each page will have one column of text, instead of two, with bigger font size (from 11 to 12). I'm following Fred Hicks' bits of advice for the layout design, which implies keeping the text in the goldilocks zone; more specifically, each column will have 2.5 alphabets with Minion Pro.

Something we want to do is to decorate the layout bit. And we love so much how Forbidden Lands did it.

We're attempting to make our own version of that type of layout. The following are only concept arts (not sketches to work upon).

The result of that frame will be something that will look like this:

Rubén has also been toying with many divider lines (again, these are only sketches, not final works; he insists on clarifying that to you).

There is some more art that will find its place in the layout.

This is how a work of art gets from sketch to final product (Quest Front #1 - From the Entrails):

Quest Front #6 - Nightmare Doorways: